Information Overload: The Blogger’s Worst Enemy and 8 Ways to Avoid It

We live in the information age. And boy do we get blasted with information. It’s dumped on us by the truckload.

Three pounds of stuff in the mailbox a day. 507 TV channels to flip through to find the weather report. 623 e-mail messages selling male enhancement pills.

And that’s only a fraction of the information that bombards us. There are billboards along the highway, news broadcasts on the radio, memos and telephone calls at the office, instruction manuals for office equipment that won’t work, family schedules to remember, bills, books, seminars, random conversations at lunch time, business meetings, it never ends.

I even feel it when I walk into the supermarket cereal aisle and have to choose from about 200 boxes screaming with bright colors and promises of low fat and high fiber, when all I want is lots of sugar and a cool little plastic prize wrapped in cellophane.

It makes my head hurt.

There’s just too much information to process these days. And when people feel overwhelmed, they react in ways that aren’t good for your blog.

Whatever your blog is about or whatever you’re selling, your blog boils down to information, usually in the form of words people have to read. But people will avoid reading when they feel overloaded, or they’ll filter out difficult information and look for information that is easier to understand, or they’ll simply misunderstand what you’re talking about and wont’ respond in the way you want.

Or, worst of all, they may just ignore you altogether.

You can’t alter the flow of information out there, but you can do some simple things in your writing to make the information you present clear, simple, and easy to understand.

Make clarity your #1 objective. You can’t communicate or persuade someone if that person doesn’t understand your point. Don’t write to show off or call attention to how smart or clever you are. Simplify your message. Make it easy to understand. Get to the point and say exactly what you mean to say. Good writing is like a clean pane of glass in a storefront—you don’t notice the glass, but you can clearly see what you want on the other side. Take a look at my headline and first paragraph on this article. No fluff. I get right to the point and you know what this article is about instantly.

Decide what you want to say before you say it. Don’t just hope something sensible will reveal itself as you write your copy. Plan and outline. Think about the point you want to make. Determine the tone or emotional feel. Know where you’re headed before you start. This helps you stay on point and avoid distracting ideas. It also helps you organize your copy so that it reads in a clear and logical way from beginning to end.

Organize your information visually. Don’t be one of those bloggers who thinks subheads, bold face, and bullets are just for search engine optimization. They’re really for visual organization. Take this article, for example. I’m using bullets because I have a list of separate tips about my main topic. If I had three big points to make, I might have used three subheads instead. Or if I were explaining a process, I would have probably used a numbered list. You can also use italics, blockquotes, and bold text for emphasis and organization.

Link information with familiar ideas. If there’s any chance for misunderstanding, use a simple analogy that relates to something your reader is already familiar and comfortable with. For example, if you’re try to explain how anti-virus software works, say it’s like a doctor that checks your computer for infections, and when it finds one, it quarantines the bug and makes your computer feel better. That’s accurate and easy to understand.

Inject emotional content. Ideas are easier to understand and remember when they are linked with emotional content or intense feelings. If you’re a blogger raising awareness to change the American tax system, don’t just explain economic theory and reel off dry statistics. Talk about how the IRS takes money from our wallets, how the government makes us work two hours every day to support a bloated government, or how frustrating it is to fill out all those confusing forms every April. People process emotional ideas more easily than intellectual ones. Make people feel so they don’t have to think so hard.

Avoid making counterproductive associations. Clever analogies, puns, and wordplay might make you look bright, but they will often sabotage clear communication. This goes for gratuitous graphics, effects, and images that are used because they are trendy or cool looking. I once saw an item with a photo of a clown handing papers to a guy sitting at a desk. The headline makes a pun about the boss being a clown. You have no idea the copy is really about office equipment until you read all the way through. It makes sense if you spend the time to figure it out, but most people won’t. Be clear, not clever.

Focus on one big idea. Don’t dump too many messages on your reader at once. Start with a simple idea. Then build and reinforce that one idea, adding information paragraph by paragraph, always linking back to that one big idea. In this article, my big idea is information overload. Each point I make refers to that one point. Even if one point isn’t as clear as I’d like it to be, the reader will never be lost or feel overwhelmed because I’m really only talking about one simple idea.

Present your main idea at the beginning and end of your copy. People tend to remember what comes first and what comes last. Things in the middle are usually forgotten. If you have a list of product benefits, for example, put the best up front, but have a few good ones for the end, too. In a blog post of any length, state your point early in the post and restate it at the end. Follow the rule for good public speaking: Tell ‘em what you’re going to say. Say it. Tell ‘em what you just said.

The supermarket can’t do much to overcome my feeling of information overload at the supermarket. And I’m pretty sure we’re all on our own with channel surfing and deleting e-mail spam.

But if you apply these ideas to your blog copy, you can reduce the feeling of information overload for your readers. If your blog becomes an oasis of clarity and simplicity in this sea of confusing information we live in, people will want to spend more time on your site reading and responding to what you have to say or sell.

Reader Comments (26)

Another blogger’s (or humans’, in general) downfall is the feet ridder. i mean feed reader. if you have as many subscriptions as I do – 160 – then you’ll know what it feels like. As soon as you get to the bottom of the list, the subscriptions at the top of the list has new updates!

Excellent stuff. As always, it comes down to clear, focussed and concise writing. But, as always, that isn’t as common out there as one would hope.

The essence of a good blog is bite sized bits of information. The average blog reader may chew through ten or more blogs on a regular basis and they want to be able to get through them without having to quit their day job. I’ve culled blogs from my rss before purely because I don’t have the time to read a novel every week.

Admittedly though, I thought your headline was referring to how I as a blogger could avoid information overload myself (e.g. half your blog reader subscriptions), and not avoid overloading “my” readers with information. Which, I guess, goes to tell just how hard it is to do, simply because readers are so diverse.

Great list of things to keep in mind – particularly simplification, clarity, and repetition (beginning and end). I’ve printed this out and will do my best to keep it in mind whenever I write, because it will definitely help me create better articles.

Great points! Not sure how far the Southern California In-n-Out burger chain has made it in this country, but they use a similar model. KEEP IT SIMPLE. Their menu is very short. Burger. Fries. Drink. Shake. None of the millions options that overload your brain and make you just want to turn back around and leave. Then they have a secret lingo if you want to complicate your order for those in the know. Like “animal style” means add a bunch of sauce and onions and crap. Or “protein style” means no gluten/ no carbs kick off the bun. You won’t find these terms on the menu cluttering the brain of the new customers, but the regulars know how to get what they want. They have the perfect business model in my mind that could be applied to any business, including our blogs. Also, they make their fries right there where you can see they are REAL potatoes. They even sneak religious messages with number references on the bottom of their packaging. They fulfill all their personal goals while also pleasing their customers. Simple. Clear. Focused.

In fact there is no such thing as information overload. There is only ceaseless repetition of the same information. If you are clever enough, you’ll read the first instance of a particular piece of information and skip the endless chain that follows it.

Awesome post that is really timely as I have increased the amount of blogs I read. If only we could all make points so clear and powerfully.

The metaphor you used in the first point about good writing being like a pane of glass is one of the best metaphors I’ve seen in a bit. Not only is it imaginative, it gets the point across. I now wonder whether that one metaphor could have summarized the whole post.